Help:How to Administrate

Administration of a Wiki can be a very tricky job. This page is intended to give administrators an idea of some of the tasks they have the ability to help perform to keep the project running smoothly.

As usual, there is never a quota, nor is there a specific requirement that any of these tasks be completed. They are simply guidelines of things that need to be done, one way or another.

Main Page Updates
The main page itself, is rarely ever touched. Usually only for minor formatting adjustments. The content displayed on the front page is actually contained in section templates. These section templates should be changed and updated once every few weeks to keep the content on our high-traffic pages fresh and interesting to new visitors.

Since these pages are particularly sensitive to vandalism, only administrators can edit them. We know to be especially concerned with accuracy, grammar and content on these pages. When updating each area, always try to preview the information a few times before submitting the final change to the live page.

The template on the main page is:
 * Template:Maintop

Change Patrol
The number of editors on our project has reached a point where one person alone cannot patrol all the changes efficiently for content and vandalism. Administrators have the ability to mark recent changes as 'patrolled'. When signed in as an administrator, on the recent changes page, you will see red exclamation marks (!) to the left of new edits. This indicates the particular edit has not been patrolled. If you click 'diff', near the top of the edit you will notice the option to mark an edit as patrolled. Doing so indicated that you have reviewed the changes made and agree they conform with the good practices and policies of the RedwallWars Wiki.

As other administrators review the recent changes, they can see edits that do not have the red exclamation mark and do not need to review them, thus preventing duplicate work.

Changes that do not conform to policies, should be rolled-back, or edited again to meet our standards, as necessary.

Article Administration
With growing numbers of registered members each day, our daily edits also increase. Because of several uncontrollable factors, from time to time poorly written or malicious edits can make their way into the database. It is one role of the administration team and the staff at-large to keep a watchful eye for such edits. If an edit is found that doesn't meet our standards, it should be reverted (aka rollback) or edited to bring it 'up-to-snuff'. Should the circumstance reveal a malicious editor, remedial action must be taken with that user.

Article Plagiarism
It happens. New users, or users unfamiliar with international copyright laws, will inevitably copy someone else's work in part, or in whole and add it to our database. This should not be in the least surprising. Our response upon finding such a case is to deal with the offender (See below), then turn our attention to the offending content.

If we can receive express permission from the original author, the content can of course stay as is. Usually, this will not be the case and the offending content must be removed, or preferably used as reference and reworked to become our own content. Naturally, citing the original author/article as sources.

New Members
New members are a very special circumstance. We should be careful to show them leniency so not to discourage their return, but still ensure they are not breaking our rules.

When a new member registers on the database, our first step is to welcome them. On their 'user talk page', we add the   tag and save it with the subject "Welcome!". This is a standardized greeting to ensure no new member receives more / less attention than another. Please do not stray from this format.

Edits can begin quickly from new members, often before they have had a change to look at our help section, in particular Help:How to Edit and Help:Editing Tips and Etiquette. Please remind new members that don't follow these guidelines with a gentle reminder on their 'talk page', adding links to applicable policy pages as necessary.

Malicious Members
An unfortunate symptom of having a freely-editable database on our unfortunately corrupt Internet is the intermittent arrival of 'bad guys'. They often find the 'honor system' too tempting to resist and begin a barrage of edits in very poor taste.

Fortunately for us, our software is well equipped to handle such eventualities. The 'rollback' feature is generously applied to all of their posts and their account is to be suspended for an appropriate amount of time.

Warnings are often a softer way of encouraging members to adhere to our policies. If the nature of the offence is not clearly malicious, a note to their user talk page and adding them to the appropriate Warnings page is often sufficient.

As a general guide, users who add non-sensical characters to a page (eg. akefjaksdf) should not be suspended, merely pointed to the Sandbox to practice, reminded of our and cleaned-up thereafter. On the other hand, users who post clearly obscene, lewd, or offensive content to one or more pages are to be banned for an absolute minimum of 1 week (input as 168 Hours), to our most harsh of punishments: 1 year. (input as 8760 Hours). The latter is usually reserved for repeat offenders. (The 'Infinite' block is only reserved for 'automated spam-bots'. These are not actual people, but rather a program running on a computer designed to add paid-advertisements to unsuspecting websites)

Our community has worked very hard, without any pay, to build this resource and does not take it lightly, having their work defaced or destroyed. Please directly contact our Administrator, Bluestripe the Wild, if there are any concerns with this policy.